Googbye Adalytics

I featured a 468×60 Google AdSense block in the footer of this blog since 2004-08-30, and included Google Analytics javascript since 2006-12-29. I failed to note adding either.

I’m behind on my 8 year blog refutation schedule, will probably do a six middle months post rather than Q2 and Q3 separately; see Q1. In the meantime, I’ll note removing AdSense and Analytics now.

I added AdSense as a small way of getting to know a hugely significant part of the net a little better through direct experience. My revenue expectations were met over the years — trivial, due to trivial traffic and relatively innocuous placement. Viewing my blog with a browser sans adblock and with flash for the first time in perhaps years just now prompted the removal and this post, which I had planned to do in the fullness of time — the innocuous placement was still ugly, and with flash enabled all of the ads are graphical and many animated. Clearly I have learned all I am capable of learning via this experiment, which I am glad I did. If I ever have something characterized as third party ads here again, it’ll be via some very different mechanism.

I more dimly recall adding Analytics because I never looked at log analysis generated reports, and maybe if I looked I would find something to optimize. I seldom looked at Analytics, and never discerned anything. If I really feel the urge to look again, I’ll use a log analysis program, and if I want an Analytics-like interface, use Piwik. I realize for some analysis, and especially some experiments, in-page javascript can be very helpful. If I ever really want to do that, Piwik can.

Relatedly, I’ve meant to recommend Don Marti’s blog for a long time, when I got around to saying and doing more about net advertising, but don’t wait for me.

7 Responses

Heya! I haven’t talked about it yet, because I haven’t had time to set up an SSL cert on it, but I have a Piwik instance running at http://analytic.sx (depending on the day, it is ANALYTICS X or Analytic Sux).

It is setup to respect “do not track” requests, and only logs two octets of IP addresses. I was planing on offering it to folks if they agree to publicize their stats (the default page goes to my stats).

If you don’t mind it being over a non-SSL connection (for now), I can hook ya up with an account. ^_^

Send me mail, I’ll try it, moved in part by sight of Robinson projection map rather than the usual Mercator derivative. ^_^

Also, you remind me that I thought at one point that when I eventually turned off GA and wrote about it that I should observe and speculate about how in the early days of the web, lots of sites made the output of their log analysis programs publicly accessible, but I haven’t seen that in a very long time. Was the change due to spam, increased commercialism and attendant secrecy, logfile management pain, ugly analysis output, other, more?

Hmmm, not sure if that was sarcasm (when I checked the link there was an error). Growing pains, that site is showing to anonymous users now. I would be jazzed to verify it is completely ignoring DNT requests, though!

Greg, I will email ya login details. There is a plugin to allow folks to sign up, but it is a patch in a trac ticket, and I am not sure it would set up the site properly, so for now we are at human scale. So tell your friends, but maybe only one a week. ^_^